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dications about how the music was intended to sound
at the dedicated lifetime events of one instrument or
their instrument family.
One advantage could be the research and education in
organology, instrument careers and socio-cultural de-
velopments over the centuries of music. Indirectly the
system creates a similarity measure for instruments
through the analysis of similar events and shared pos-
sible performances. The use cases show that available
databases and the post-processing of data sets have
yet to be improved in order to increase the quality
of results of the recommendation system. For exam-
ple, detailed information about tuning and tones are
missing for a better instrumentation similarity analy-
sis. But for now, the system satisfies the intention of
creating hypotheses of joint appearance, which can be
verified or falsified by further inspections of musicol-
ogists.
6.2 Limitations
In general the amount of displayable items is not lim-
ited. All instruments in the timeline are stacked atop
each other so the scrollable height is growing with
each new entry. However, the number of instrument
rows and related events is limited by the amount that
is humanly processible. We observed a result set with
150 oboes from one museum with the same produc-
tion event date and location and the same matched
musical pieces were stacked on each other, using a
lot of screen space. This output requires the screen’s
height three times (depending on resolution and used
minimum of instrument rows height) but is also neg-
ligible by the user who is aware of the general quality
of the data. Also, the system is not meant to review,
but rather to direct towards new hypotheses. Such re-
view, especially verification of suggested facts, has
to be performed intellectual with additional knowl-
edge. Nevertheless, the falsification is easily possi-
ble by using the visualizations, but this use case un-
derlines again the dependence of calculated and dis-
played statements on the quality and quantity of the
used data points.
6.3 Future Work
The measurement of similarity will be improved e.g.
by the consideration of geopolitical information like
provinces and countries. Therefore, the aggregation
of information from other repositories and a better
alignment of the different existing vocabularies is
necessary. Also, the derivation of new information
out of existing is possible. For example, the database
of the musiXplora (Khulusi et al., 2020a) contains
over 32.000 persons in the musical context with a va-
riety of information about them, e.g., the denomina-
tion of musicians. Hypotheses like the denomination
of cities (as mentioned in the first use case in Sec-
tion 5) could be derived from the denominations of all
locally born persons. Further, the system is expand-
able by e.g. a force-directed graph for the results of
the recommendation system. Therefore instruments
or musical pieces could be grouped depending on the
demand of research questions. A box plot glyph could
be evolved to a bean plot (Kampstra et al., 2008) for
the better creation of shapes for the matched results.
Furthermore, we want to increase the linkage of the
different attributes and views e.g. by implementing a
time slider for the map, to see the geospatial trends of
the two entity classes over time.
7 CONCLUSION
Due to the increasing amount of digital cultural her-
itage resources, user interfaces that support aggrega-
tion, mapping and linkage gain more and more im-
portance. Our project aimed to find relations between
musical instruments and historical performances of
musical pieces. To encounter this, we cooperated
with musicologists, aggregated and linked two digital
repositories. In addition, we defined a multi-faceted
similarity measure for the likeness of two matching
events. To achieve the ability of qualitative close
reading and quantitative distant reading of the results,
we designed a new timeline metaphor with semantic
zoom levels accompanied with a map to review results
in a temporal as well as a geographical context. The
presented use cases indicate the value of our approach
to support new research questions in musicology.
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